Feeling at home while alone in a crowd
Public anonymity is a feature of urban life so often taken for granted
There’s something to be said for being a face in the crowd.
The ability to sit alone, tucked onto a bar stool in the Village, the din of strangers and the clinking of glass, the warm light of the restaurant bleeding through windows and casting shadows onto the snow in the street. Perhaps there is music playing, people dancing or a performer onstage. The casual rhythms of life just washing over you — slivers of conversation, fragments of other worlds briefly intersecting with your own. Mundanity, or as one friend described it, the feeling of “being alone but not alone.”
Of all that has been lost during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the comforting anonymity of gathering spaces seems like a strange subject on which to focus — particularly when so many Torontonians have endured profound loss this year. It is a situation that has kept loved ones apart, shuttered businesses and left many without work. In the grand scheme of things, the ability to sit in a bar, alone and without purpose, seems low on the priority list.
And yet, the comfort of public anonymity is a palpable one, a feature of urban life that is so often taken for granted and has been celebrated for centuries.
“For the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite,” wrote Charles Baudelaire in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” “To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world — impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.”
The spectator Baudelaire refers to here is a figure who moves unencumbered through 19th-century Paris, a passive wanderer observing the streets and arcades around him. A figure of modernity and an extension of the city itself, this flaneur catalogues life within the streets while simultaneously contributing to it, a privileged fly on the wall of urban experience.
This form of passive participation would be impossible in 2020. Even during the most relaxed phases of the last nine months, interacting in social space has required significant planning and co-ordination. There is the song and dance of physical distancing, as well as masks and hand sanitizer. There is navigating friends and family members both within and outside designated bubbles, and disclosing potentially risky behaviours. Trips outside the home are task-oriented: productive, focused, safe. And the interior of bars, restaurants and shops (when we’re allowed inside) have been reconfigured, with Plexiglas shields, reduced capacity and contact tracing. Lingering is discouraged pretty much everywhere.
To exist in public in 2020 is a declarative, predictable act — one that is understandably designed to keep us safe, but one that also privileges direct, premeditated contact over fleeting, spontaneous connection. It strips out the impulsive, unpredictable essence of social spac
es, and whittles the collective down to individual units. In public, we are now known quantities: friends, families, lovers, employees and consumers. There are very few loners and never any strangers. We provide our names and numbers. The unpredictable corners of urban space have been emptied out.
It makes me nostalgic for the evenings spent alone walking Yonge Street, meandering past the busy taverns and used bookshops, ducking behind shelves and listening in on the conversation between the weary shop owner and his knowledgeable regulars. Or afternoons in the Eaton Centre,
stopping for a quick bite at the food court, watching crowds of holiday shoppers burdened with bags and patient kids lining up to see Santa Claus (the impatient ones having temper tantrums). Or the crowded streetcar on warm summer days, teens piling in from the Exhibition, massive stuffed animals in tow.
I think back to the many nights standing along the perimeter of the gay bar, hidden behind a wall of people, watching a drag performer take to the stage — the crowd surrounding them and buzzing with energy, singing along to every word. Long before I knew anyone in the LGBTQ community, those nights were my first, tentative steps out of the closet. I wasn’t there to meet someone — I was too shy and awkward — but to be a part of something much bigger than myself. To see other people like me, to learn the language and to feel safe in numbers.
This year, especially as we near the holidays, I’ve often wondered about young LGBTQ people; the hipper versions of myself now at the start of their queer journeys. I feel for them, confined to their homes and deprived of this time to experience the power of those spaces, to have the chance to sit alone in those corners and observe queer life. No digital interface can ever capture that feeling, that sense of being one surrounded by many, of the possibility contained within those walls. Of messy, unpredictable life.
And so, we wait until we can all be together again. Wait until we can reconnect with our friends and our families, our co-workers and our lovers. Wait until we can manoeuvre the crowded sidewalks, escalators and streetcars of the city.
And wait until we are once again nothing more than a stranger perched on a bar stool.